Ummm, never mind.

"Women wearing veils were NOT "banned" from voting during the last Quebec provincial election last month. They were asked to show their faces along with a piece of ID like everyone else, over the obvious legal and safety concerns."

Well, no. The rules as originally stated were that women wearing veils _could_ vote, if they had proper ID or someone to vouch for them. This ruling by the chief electoral officer covered all such situations, not just Muslims.

When word of this got out, via a bunch of newspapers that make a specialty of Muslim-bashing, the reaction was extraordinary... all kinds of abuse, up to and including death threats against the electoral official involved. At which point, he caved, and said that Muslim women wearing veils couldn't vote.

This is called democracy in action.

Salon readers should note that these actions against Muslim girls on sporting teams are taking place against the backdrop of a provincial election in Québec that was notable for the degree of abuse directed by candidates from all parties against members of minority groups: the head of the PQ called a 'tapette' (basically 'a fag') who then goes on to prove his regular-guy credentials by calling Chinese people 'slanty-eyed', perorations on the machinations of Jews by an ADQ candidate, lots of abuse directed at Muslims, denial of the Rwanda genocide by another péquiste.

It was a pretty ugly election. In the 'Grand-Hérouxville' that is today's Québec, you can prove you're a real pur laine by bashing minorites.

Yeah... that's why Canada spends about 65% per capita of what the USA spends on health care - and why Americans from Buffalo without health insurance sneak across the border for treatment.

was exactly what I meant. A quick erasure of the Iraqi Army, as in Gulf War I (or II, depending how you count), CNN shows the drive through the streets with the Iraqis throwing flowers, then a whole bunch of Americans figured they could sit back and watch the smart bomb videos again. (There's quite a network involved in exchanging that stuff, y'know?)

Did every American expect and hope that it would be easy and fun? No, of course not... but enough did so that there was no serious domestic opposition to that little adventure. This invasion and occupation - and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that resulted - are a stain on _America_, the whole country... not just on the Republicans or right-wingers or conservatives adventurers who set the wheels in motion.

and so I did. Thing is, I'm a guy. Does this mean I'm ovulating?

Quite possibly, yes - or at least their criticisms would be muted. One of the ways to think about the morality of a particular war is to think about the alternatives... for example, how many people would have died through state violence in Iraq if America had not invaded. The right does this all the time. The problem is, they base predictions of deaths due to state violence on the situation in Iraq in 1990, not that in 2003.

Let's say, for argument, everything had gone right after the invasion, and that the total excess deaths associated with the invasion were on the order of American military casualties today... let's say 3000. I think we'd find a lot of lefties recognising an argument that that many dead innocents (let's not mince words) would be justified in the removal from power of a thug like Saddam Hussein, especially since some hundreds of people were still dying in Iraq through state violence at the end of the 1990s.

But this study indicates _650,000_ dead - and perhaps more importantly, a death rates that's accelerating as the civil war that America started intensifies. You need a bloody big moral burden to justify 650,000 dead innocents, as we edge into the numbers associated with the Rwanda genocide.

America - and Americans - invaded Iraq in large part because many of you, and your government, thought that it would be easy and fun. The rest was lies and paranoia. Where's the moral weight in that?

"... how many would have been killed and still under the heel of Saddam if we hadn't gone in?"

Yes. Amnesty International was analysing the number of people killed by Saddam Hussein's government in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It came out to a few hundred people a year. (In other words, the last 3+ years have involved about 3000 years of casualties at those rates.) The biggest 'non-natural' killer of Iraqis in the 1990s was the sanctions regime.

The methodology in this case really isn't that unusual: it's not exactly the same as that used in for example political polling in the United States, but it's not far off - and, as the paper notes, it's exactly the same methodology as used to estimate deaths in other conflicts, including Kosovo and Darfur. If you believe those numbers, there's no reason not to believe the numbers in this paper (subject, of course, to the usual caveats about the statitical uncertainties involved).

The methodology is quite different from that used by Iraq Body Count, and IBC has been careful to point out that their totals are certainly underestimates of the total deaths resulting from the invasion. I think one of the most significant elements here is that the casualty trend lines (the changes in rates of casualties per time period, independent of the actual numbers) is very similar in this study, the IBC counts and DoD counts of casualties.

I think that that said just about all that needs to be said.